An empirical appraisal of eLife's assessment vocabulary.

ABSTRACT: Research articles published by the journal eLife are accompanied by short evaluation statements that use phrases from a prescribed vocabulary to evaluate research on 2 dimensions: importance and strength of support. Intuitively, the prescribed phrases appear to be highly synonymous (e.g., important/valuable, compelling/convincing) and the vocabulary's ordinal structure may not be obvious to readers. We conducted an online repeated-measures experiment to gauge whether the phrases were interpreted as intended. We also tested an alternative vocabulary with (in our view) a less ambiguous structure. A total of 301 participants with a doctoral or graduate degree used a 0% to 100% scale to rate the importance and strength of support of hypothetical studies described using phrases from both vocabu

SUBMITTER: Hardwicke TE 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11340897 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature